There’s something definitely… ironic… when a bunch of fanfic authors sit around and laugh about how “trashy” and “shitty” historical romance novels are.
Like honestly, this is part of why I haven’t written more of any of my historical AUs: if you’re gonna laugh about it and talk about how ridiculous and lulzy the genre is, I do nooot want to crank out more for you to be snidely ironic about.
If I’m writing something, it’s because I believe in it. Even if I know it’s cracktastic and not up to high artistic standards–I’m doing it because I believe that spontaneity and play are important in creative communities. But it knocks me down every time someone acts like the stuff I make is worthy of contempt or mockery.
I have some thoughts about this! Because before I got into fanfic back in, like, March of this year, I had spent the previous six months getting heavily into historical romance and following a number of the current big names in historical romance on Twitter. And let me tell you, those authors? They know their shit. There is no discrete genre that takes its craft *and* its publicity as seriously as romance. I was a witness to the shit show that was the controversy about the SFWA newsletter, and let me tell you, when the dust cleared and people started actually trying to be constructive in their thoughts about how to create a real professional publication? They pointed to the Romance Writers of America, because their newsletter treats all its subscribers like the professionals they are.
And the historical romance writers? They are even more amazing to me, because they do so much incredibly detailed research. Even if their book ends up being a fun, rompy, very-nearly-AU, you better believe they know their historical facts. Do you know another genre where the authors regularly teach themselves to sew and wear accurate period clothing so they can describe ball scenes correctly?
Anyway… I feel like I’ve picked up a huge amount about the craft of writing from both the fanfic and romance writing communities, both of which are generally dismissed for containing sex and feels, so instead of writing each other off, let’s band together! In that spirit, if people would like to read some kickass historical fiction, allow me to recommend some authors:
Tessa Dare: Her Spindle Cove series features a small English coastal village functioning as a haven for
women in need of refuge, whether it be due to scandal or spinsterhood or
poor health or any other oddity, such as excessive independence of
spirit. However, I think my favorite book of Dare’s so far may actually be the latest one in her Castles Ever After series, When a Scot Ties the Knot,
(which can be read as a stand-alone,) because it features a young woman
who establishes a career as a scientific illustrator after avoiding
marriage by faking engagement to a soldier she made up… except all those
letters she sent off into the void to sell the story to her parents
actually went somewhere. So adorable! So hilarious! There’s even a
romantic sub-plot featuring lobsters.
Eloisa James: This particular author is, for her day job, a Shakespeare professor, so you best believe she understands research. Her books are… amazing. Her Desperate Duchesses series is set in the Georgian period (ie, when Hamilton is going on across the sea), and if you long for some men with equally ridiculous fashion sense as the women, look no further. But that’s just a side note; the thing that really makes her books stand out (to me, anyway) is how well she can write unhappy married couples realistically overcoming miscommunications, sometimes years in the making, to fall in love with each other, either for the first time or all over again. Furthermore, in her Fairy Tale retellings series, she doesn’t romanticize what it’s like for virgins with no sex ed to try to navigate their way through things. (Seriously, read Once Up a Tower, it will change your whole conception of romance novels.)
Courtney Milan: Read her Regency-era Brothers Sinister series. The whole thing. The female characters in these books! They are the best! And the male
characters, too, yes, they’re good. But the women all have such
amazingly interesting lives and stories! There’s a chess champion, an
intentionally socially off-putting heiress, a female biologist (and the
man who presents her work to the public), and a suffragette newspaper
editor. Plus the ebook “box-set” comes with all the side-character novellas already
interleaved. And each book has historical notes at the end, which I found fascinating. I love the balance Milan creates between witty character banter and their attempts to address serious societal issues of the times. (She’s also started a modern series about a not!Apple tech company that I am eagerly anticipating the next installment of. Interracial couples! Trans characters! Trading places plot devices!)
Sarah MacLean: I was instructed to start with Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake,
which I did, and oh, the wonderful hijinks that ensued! As if the title
wasn’t a clue. These are again Regency romances with intelligent,
dissatisfied women who decide to take their lives into their own hands. The Love by the Numbers series then leads into the Rules of Scoundrels series, and while each book tells its own romance, you’ll pick up so much more background gossip between the characters and amazingly delicate and interwoven worldbuilding if you read everything in order.
Mary Robinette Kowal: Not actually usually shelved in the romance section, since what Kowal writes are historically-based fantasy novels, but her attention to detail is impeccable. She’s the one who taught herself to make Regency gowns and does all her readings in period costume, down to the shoes and undergarments. She built a custom spellchecker to flag any word not actually used by Jane Austen for her first series, which started as pastiche but quickly gained its own momentum. The worldbuilding is meticulous; everything is period-correct Austen/Regency, until it’s not, because she created a magic system that works with the time and culture, but also changed the time and culture just by existing. She thought about everything. Her new series is set in WWI, and looks at how the war might have been different if spiritualism had been true, ie, what if there had been a corps of women receiving battlefield reports from recently deceased soldiers? I just finished this one, and the level of detail is true #authorgoals.
Meljean Brook: These are actually steampunk romances (rather than true historicals) with an amazing amount of alt history
worldbuilding, but the impression that stuck with me after reading them
was that Brook was putting on an absolute master class in how to do
character-driven plot. Nothing in these books is gratuitous. No detail
of the world is ever revealed unless a character has a reason to be
thinking about it, no interaction the two people involved in the romance
has is done simply for the sake of drama. The people are the story–and they just happen to also be police detectives and sky pirates and treasure hunters. Brook has also clearly put a lot of thought into the various power
structures of her world, and while the books can be viewed through the
lens of romping adventures on airships, she is also addressing serious
themes such as the aftermath of slavery and colonialism, racism,
ableism, and attitudes towards homosexuality.
I could go on, but I’m going to stop here. I have a lot to say about books, clearly.
I also love Alexis Harrington, who writes detailed, wonderful, thoughtful books set in places like Oregon, Washington, and Alaska in the late 19th and early 20th century, and Joanna Bourne, whose series on British spies in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France is absolutely amazing.
All of this, and more. Every trope you love in fanfic? You can find it in romance novels. And I mean that in a completely non-lolzy way – it’s *fantastic*.
But more importantly: The idea that romance is some kind of lesser art than other genres should sound really familiar, guys.
1. Museum artists have been to school or apprenticed as artists. So have I and countless other fanartists. Next.
2. You don’t own Castiel. Andy Warhol didn’t own Campbell’s Soup, Coca Cola, or Brillo. His paintings of Elvis dressed as a cowboy were taken directly from a promo shot of a film called Flaming Star. His paintings or Marilyn Monroe were taken directly from a promo shot from a film called Niagara.
In 1889, John Singer Sargent painted a portrait of then-contemporary actress Ellen Terry performing as Lady Macbeth. The list goes on—and includes many other artists. There are far too many examples for me to list here of classical artists taking it upon themselves to paint fanart for literature and drama they admired that was contemporary to their time that didn’t belong to them. Copyright is an entirely modern form of gatekeeping on what is ultimately still just mythology, and it doesn’t change the fact that people will always seek to explore and own for themselves their culture’s mythological identity, whether it be carved in stone or written in a book or played out on television.
3. They’re using their art to speak to something political and universal. I drew a portrait of Castiel because I’m an asexual, transgender woman who grew up in a post-Cold War television culture, and the characters I choose to draw and how I choose to draw them reflect not only my childhood experiences but my current political and social views as a humanist and a feminist.
4. Castiel doesn’t have a context that allows just anyone to understand him. Nobody fucking knows who the girl with the pearl earring is.
Bottom line, it has nothing to do with what we draw and everything to do with who we are—young women who have historically been erased from art history and disregarded by gatekeepers and elitists as immature and amateur outsider artists despite being the driving force behind pop culture and modern mythology.
Ten points from Gryffindor.
Does anyone also want to tell OP that practically all of classical/renaissance art featured in museums is also fanart of the Bible/and or other Religious stories from around the world like Greek/Roman mythology???
So, when I was doing my thesis on whether or not fanfiction should be considered a legitimate genre of literature, my advising professor asked me for examples. I gave him the generic ones, of course – “Pride & Prejudice and Zombies” is a horror fanfic of “Pride & Prejudice”, “50 Shades of Grey” is an erotica fic of “Twilight" – and that seemed to make him understand what fanfiction is, but not how it’s useful. So I thought about it, and, after about a minute, I said, “Paradise Lost is basically a fanfiction of the Book of Genesis. And The Divine Comedy is an epic self-insertion fic for Catholic doctrine. So, basically, you were teaching us fanfiction last semester.” I had never before seen a grown man’s eyes widen with such fear, incomprehension, disgust, awe, and understanding.
So I’m on AO3 and I see a lot of people who put “I do not own [insert fandom here]” before their story.
Like, I came on this site to read FAN fiction. This is a FAN fiction site. I’m fully aware that you don’t own the fandom or the characters. That’s why it’s called FAN FICTION.
Oh you youngins… How quickly they forget.
Back in the day, before fan fiction was mainstream and even encouraged by creators… This was your “please don’t sue me, I’m poor and just here for a good time” plea.
Cause guess what? That shit used to happen.
how soon they forget ann rice’s lawyers.
What happened with her lawyers.
History became legend. Legend became myth…. And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.
I worked with one of the women that got contacted by Rice’s lawyers. Scared the hell out of her and she never touched fandom again. The first time I saw a commission post on tumblr for fanart, I was shocked.
One of the reasons I fell out of love with her writing was her treatment of the fans… (that and the opening chapter of Lasher gave me such heebie-jeebies with the whole underage sex thing I felt unclean just reading it.)
I have zero problem with fanart/fic so long as the creators aren’t making money off of it. It is someone else’s intellectual property and people who create fan related works need to respect that (and a solid 98% of them do.)
The remaining 2% are either easily swayed by being gently prompted to not cash in on someone else’s IP. Or they DGAF… and they are the ones who will eventually land themselves in hot water. Either way: this isn’t much of an excuse to persecute your entire fanbase.
But Anne Rice went off the deep end with this stuff by actively attacking people who were expressing their love for her work and were not profiteering from it.
The Vampire Chronicles was a dangerous fandom to be in back in the day. Most of the works I read/saw were hidden away in the dark recesses of the internet and covered by disclaimers (a lot of them reading like thoroughly researched legal documents.)
And woe betide anyone who was into shipping anyone with ANYONE in that fandom. You were most at risk, it seemed, if your vision of the characters deviated from the creators ‘original intentions.’ (Hypocritical of a woman who made most of her living writing erotica.)
Imagine getting sued over a headcanon…
Put simply: we all lived in fear of her team of highly paid lawyers descending from the heavens and taking us to court over a slashfic less than 500 words long.
all
of
this
Reblogging because I can’t believe there are people out there who don’t know the story behind fan fiction disclaimers.
Yeah, back in the old days we were all afraid of being sued, especially since the whole ~internet fandom~ thing was fairly new and we didn’t have copyright laws for online content. We didn’t have social media to make discussing your favourite thing such a common occurrence that the limit to how much you can engage with it would be stretched.
That whole Anne Rice business was freaking scary for any fanfic writer, because it could be the end for all of us. But well, we’re still here, so fuck you, Anne Rice (don’t sue me).
Nowadays, unless you’re making money, it’s impossible to lose if an author is stupid enough to sue you over fan work. I don’t write disclaimers anymore, it’s sort of unnecessary.
(And btw, no disclaimer would protect us if they decided we were trespassing copyright laws. Luckily that didn’t happen.)
Also worth mentioning:
– Copyright stuff is part of what the OTW (aka the Organization for Transformative Works, aka AO3′s parent org) does. OTW: making fic-reading non-profit and easier on the eyeballs AND making fandom a safer environment for creators.
I weirdly love that there are crotchety fandom elders around who say shit like “in my day, (insert fandom term) meant this specifically, but now you kids just use it to mean any old thing.”
It seriously gives fandom such a sense of heritage and family, like yes grandma, tell me more about how you had to write fic uphill both ways in the snow when you were my age.
back in my day, lemons and limes were not something you used to make a good guacamole ! *rattles cane*
people who go really hard over like hating villains and hating their fanbases and being so disappointed in anyone who so much as shows the slightest appreciation for anything even slightly morally impure are like the obnoxious vegans of fandom
Kimchi and Justice 